ABC Lateline report on Neuroplasticity including an interview with NORMAN DOIDGE, a PSYCHIATRIST in Canada.

The research into neuroplasticity in neuro-science gives us an insight into what is possible for NLP interventions and generally how the brain functions.

In recent years, many experts have changed the way they think about the brain and now believe it can actually reinvent itself. The theory’s called neuroplasticity, the idea that the brain can build new connections to compensate for injury or disease….

…She was given an antibiotic for a routine hysterectomy which poisoned her inner ear, so that 97 per cent of what’s called the vestibular apparatus or the balance organ in the inner ear, was blown out. And one day she woke up and she had no balance. She was a woman who felt she was perpetually falling. And in fact, even when she fell to the floor, the sense of falling didn’t go away. She felt a trap door opened up and swallowed her….. Now, Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, had been working on sensory substitution and he found a way to give her a hat that contained something called an accelerometer, which is like a gyroscope. It told her her position in space. It fed information to a computer that fed the information back to something about the size of a stick of chewing gum that had about 100 little electrodes on it that gave little sparks on her tongue – very gentle stimulation that felt like champagne bubbles, so that if she rolled forward she would get champagne bubbles rolling forward telling her the position of her head. And I was there when this cure occurred and she couldn’t stand up, she put on the hat, they turned on the machine and suddenly it was as though there was total peace of mind that she had and her balance was restored.

…what Descartes did is he was trying to solve a problem, which is that it seemed that the rules of mind were different, would follow logic or maybe the rules of emotion, and the brain seemed to follow, you know, the physical laws of Galileo and the mechanical laws of movement. And he argued that the mind will influence the brain, but he could never persuasively show how that happens. And we still haven’t totally solved that problem. But what we can do now, which is very, very exciting, is we can actually see a person in the process of thinking and the number of brain cells – the number of connections between brain cells being altered.

Attention turns out to be very, very important for speeding up plastic change. And many people with strokes have a problem with attention.

For more details, watch the ABC Video ABC Lateline report on Neuroplasticity or read the transcript from the program.

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